Fake Italian: An 83% True Autobiography with Pseudonyms and Some Tall Tales by Marc DiPaoloMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Thursday, April 18, 2024
Review: Fake Italian: An 83% True Autobiography with Pseudonyms and Some Tall Tales
Fake Italian: An 83% True Autobiography with Pseudonyms and Some Tall Tales by Marc DiPaoloMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Review: A Very Punchable Face
A Very Punchable Face by Colin JostMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’m hooked on these Saturday Night Live memoirs. For a time that was because, with a son contemplating a career in comedy writing, I wanted to see how these guys had launched theirs. For another, they keep coming up as cheap deals on Audible, and I figure ‘why not.’
I like Colin Jost for the most part. He’s been doing Weekend Update for what feels like forever, and I think that he and Michael Che are possibly the best I remember doing it. (I’d say much better than Seth Meyers or Kevin Nealon, and I confess I thought Norm MacDonald was uneven in the role.)
So, I was prepared to like this for specific reasons beyond the generic ones I bring to any of these comedy biographies: that the comic will talk about the arc of their career, and that they’ll offer an insight into how their comedy intersects with other comedy of its time.
And, in Jost’s case, I had to wonder how it came to pass that he has married Scarlett Johansson.
From the start, Jost acknowledges the nature of his humor. As he explains his choice of title, he reflects on the fact that he appears to many people as the embodiment of white male privilege. He is a handsome guy (something he modestly acknowledges but then underplays in descriptions of his overweight, acne-challenged younger self). He went to Harvard where he was classmates with Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins. And he was hired as an SNL writer when he was barely 23!
Yeah, break out the sad violins for this guy.
At the same time, and this is to his credit, he joins in making fun of himself. At root, he is a gag man – a 21st century version of the jokemakers who floated decades of Reader’s Digest columns (for which he admits he wrote in the brief period of his little-money struggles). He says he worked hard to hone his craft, and I believe it. He has written and re-written things to make people laugh. And, after his several thousand attempts, he has a real pro’s sense of what works.
He is also a modest insult comedian – this is my analysis here – with a twist. He hurls his insults primarily at himself, owning and taking advantage of his being so “punchable.”
He’s good at it, and I enjoy the experience of it on the show, but here in the book, it begins to feel one-note. Yes, for me it’s a helpful insight to see him routinely making fun of himself, but, if he’s going to write a book about his comedy career, I’d like to see him really think about that. To what extent is he aware of that as a political move (“political,” at least, in these times). To what extent is he taking himself, someone he and Michael Che both mock as one of the whitest people imaginable, down a peg in the context of our larger discussions about race and privilege?
Instead, we often get what seem to me attenuated riffs that aren’t funny. There’s a chapter on the six times he wound up needing stitches on his face. There’s another, decidedly unfunny one, about the multiple times he has accidentally shit his pants.
The weakest chapters in any of these memoirs are the ones where you can feel the comedian relaxing into a “now I can recycle some of the bits I’ve used for years.” Those rarely work in book form, and there are far too many here.
There’s a sobering chapter about his mother, who, as chief medical officer for the New York Fire Department, performed heroically during and after 9/11, but it feels out of place next to the funniest bits here – the opening when he describes her as having Large Irish Family Name Syndrome in which she has to run through the name of every kid in the extended family to get to the right one.
One striking element that he raises without quite exploring is the sense that he and Pete Davidson, as Staten Islanders, were both stamped by their family’s experiences during 9/11. (Davidson’s father was a firefighter killed when one of the buildings came down, something he has explored in sometimes cutting-edge comedy, opening up about his pain without giving into pathos.)
What does it say, I wonder, that their relatively small community was so shaped by those events, and how does his and Davidson’s comedy reflect that?
This is a short book, but I found myself hoping it would end soon. I contemplated bailing on it, but I held out hope for one final reveal: how did a guy this self-deprecating (despite his seeming privilege) wind up marrying one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
He name drops her, and he talks about some of the challenges of his relationships in general, but ultimately we get nada. He’s welcome not to tell the story; I’m not interested in the tabloid angle. But, please, don’t start the story and then bail on it.
Despite the title, Jost is a likeable guy. That’s enough to raise this above the nadir of the SNL memoir genre – David Spade’s has the bottom run sewn up in my book – but it’s ultimately a cut below most of the others I have read.
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Review: Will I Now Have This Pleasure
Review of Madeleine Sherbondy’s Will I Now Have This Pleasure
Maddie is my nephew’s girlfriend, and this is a chapbook published by a small press at Susquehanna University, but that doesn’t keep me from being awfully impressed.
Everything else is a <spoiler>
Maddie describes herself as interested in Bible “fan fiction.” After reading this, I see why that’s sort of accurate, but it doesn’t imply the subtlety or the ambition of what she’s doing. I guess, for me, “fan fiction” suggests something trivial, like a lounge act performing a cover of a familiar song. This is more like a serious jazz musician interpreting a standard – most of the same notes are there, but the result is dramatically different.
This is the story of Sarah laughing at the idea of conceiving in her old age as a bewildered Abraham (here, Abe) tries to let himself believe in the promise that their children will one day be as numerous as the stars. (Though, for him, the stars are often no more than glow-in-the-dark stickers he has attached to the ceiling of their bedroom.) Abe has a vision of how he wants the world to be and, while he does seem to love Sarah, he loves her as much for her “womb” as for her own self.
Meanwhile, Sarah has a radical openness to the world. The stunning opening paragraph tells us of the way she “unzips” her skin, stepping out of it as she readies to make love. (There’s a nice parallel with the way in which Maddie also turns the form of this Biblical story inside out.) Abe once did the same before her, but – as the story opens – he no longer does. As I read it, he has become someone alert to history and legacy – to abstraction. She, on the other hand, remains someone in love with the person in front of her.
Or, as she comes to narrate it, “It was not always like this.” Abe’s change in ambition begins to close her off. When a friend of his – someone whose name she cannot bring herself to remember – offers, she sleeps with him. Soon after, she discovers she is pregnant; it has taken sex with someone other than Abe to make it possible.
In a long stretch where the novella (long short story?) really opens up, she thinks about the growing fetus as it reaches the size of one fruit or another. When she has her abortion, the nurse – Lilith, a device cleverly taken from Midrashic story – plucks the “apple” sized fetus from her womb in what feels an Adam-and-Eve reference.
In the powerful end, Sarah laughs at Abe’s bewilderment and frustration at the pregnancy test she reveals to him. He thinks he will become the patriarch he has prophesied he will be, but she has asserted an agency that has betrayed him. But “betray” is the wrong word. She has lived, lived in full.
She laughs, then, not in triumph, not for perversely denying Abe anything, but because she has lived with the courage to open herself radically to the world and, though battered, to zip herself back into a skin of her own.</spoiler>
Powerful stuff by a young writer I am honored to know first hand.
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